This week, Microsoft Research showed off Sphere, a variation on its surface …

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This week, Microsoft Research is showing off a project that has been the subject of rumor since March: a spherical display with an interface that's controlled by touch and gesture. The demonstration certainly has a significant wow factor but, beyond the technology, it shows that Microsoft is taking its work on surface computing very seriously. Right now, however, surface interfaces seem to have more limitations than markets.

The new device, called Sphere, is certainly intriguing. According to the Seattle PI blog (which shot the video embedded below), Microsoft is showing it off to a meeting of computer science faculty in order to start gathering feedback on potential applications and modifications. The display itself is provided by a third party, Global Imagination, but the interface is driven by the same sensors and software that are behind Microsoft's Surface initiative. The demo shows that regular Surface applications, such as a picture viewer, run on Sphere, as does specialized software, such as one app that displays a movable globe.

Microsoft's initial demonstrations of Surface came at a time where the cynical could dismiss the device as an attempt to draw some attention away from the touch interface that was appearing in Apple's iPod and iPhone. But Surface has now been developed into a marketable product, and the Sphere effort shows that Redmond is interested in seeing where else this technology might find a home. We've been watching the tech develop for a while, and most of us at Ars just don't see a lot of options for it at the moment beyond niche applications.

One of the issues is basic ergonomics. Touch screen computers have been available for decades; I remember seeing one at a Hewlett-Packard research center when I was in high school—and I'm in my 40s. But the mouse and keyboard have consistently won out simply because they allow users to rest their arms in a reasonably comfortable position, instead of having to lift them to the screen to operate the computer. The alternative, dropping the screen to waist level, has its own set of ergonomic drawbacks (hello, neck pain!).

The result is that touch screens don't make sense for frequently used computing interfaces, with the exception of gadget-sized devices. Given the size constraints here, the device and its interface are necessarily going to be unified. These devices also illustrate another issue facing Surface-based devices. For music players and cell phones, the interfaces are generally simplified, and can be manipulated with a limited number of touch gestures, like touches, swipes, and pinches. Surface-sized devices can support far more sophisticated interfaces, which means that they have to deal with many more touch gestures in order to provide users with sufficient control.

You can see an example in the video above of the problems this causes. Basic operations, like rotating the globe or scaling pictures, can be accomplished by simple, intuitive gestures. But placing your hand flat on top of a picture in order to perform the equivalent of closing a picture document is anything but intuitive. Worse still, many of the operations performed in a given context, such as picture management, won't apply in a different setting, such as viewing a globe, meaning each application will wind up with its own, unique set of gestures. It will be a throwback to the days of DOS commands.

Our Microsoft columnist has argued that we're going to get surface interfaces whether we like them or not, so Microsoft is ahead of the curve here. But, for most commonly used items that aren't computers at the moment, people have voted with their feet, in that they have made it clear that the last thing they want to do is get up, cross the room, and interact physically with hardware. We've happily accepted extremely baroque remote control interfaces, provided they keep us in our seats.

This isn't to say that Microsoft has wasted effort in developing Surface and Sphere. There are clearly cases where surface interfaces may be enjoyable, useful, or intuitive. But these cases are likely to be pretty rare and, perhaps most significantly, each case is likely to be specialized—there won't be a Surface interface, but many customized ones. Which, in the end, is the antithesis of the general purpose computing that Microsoft has made its fortune developing.